Past Initiatives

Call for participation in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and Ordnance Survey United Kingdom Interoperability Assessment Plugfest (UKIAP) 2013

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Ordnance Survey, with the support of the Association for Geographic Information (AGI), are leading the first of a series of events called the United Kingdom Interoperability Assessment Plugfest (UKIAP) 2013. The purpose of UKIAP 2013 is to advance the interoperability of geospatial products and services based on OGC standards within the UK geospatial information (GI) community. The results of the Plugfest will allow Ordnance Survey to provide best practice guidance to those who want to consume or implement geospatial web services or products based on OGC standards. UKIAP 2013 is open to commercial and open source vendors and to all GI organisations in the UK. This request is being issued as a Call For Participation (CFP) because the OGC and Ordnance Survey would like to involve as many participants in the initiative as possible.

The MOSIA consortium group (MOdeling Support with standards for Information and Architecture models applied to ATM) is a consortium of organisations with a background in Information management and Information, Service and Architecture modeling from a set of standardisaton organisations, in particular OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), ISO/TC211, INSPIRE and OMG (Object Management Group). The MOSIA group is led by SINTEF and consist of the following partners:
· SINTEF
· Snowflake Software
· Open Geospatial Consortium (OGCE)
· No Magic
· Institute for Geoinformatics (IfGI), Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU)
· iGSI
· Envitia
· Carmenta
· Managed AIS (M-AIS)

This project is a Request for Information (RFI) regarding SWE Implementation Maturity

OGC is seeking information about maturity of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Standards. This RFI seeks information about successful implementations of SWE to provide the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) with a “state of the practice” and benefits of using SWE. While all implementations of SWE are of interest, of particular interest to this RFI are operational implementations of SWE in the defence and space community, with direct interest in Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR).

The Geo4NIEM Project has been organized to address specific functional requirements to meet the following objectives:

Develop recommendations for the inclusion and standard use of embedded GML with NIEM IEPDs.

Develop recommendations for the standardize use of Naming and Design Rules and the use of adaptors (e.g. NIEM wrapper for GML)

Test and demonstrate use of a standardized embedded GML and adaptors within NIEM IEPDs.

Develop Architecture documentation and fact sheet for the use of embedded GML and adaptors for use with NIEM IEPDs

Develop Recommendations for the inclusion of a Geospatial Domain within NIEM

The Geo4NIEM initiative aims to address important Information Exchange requirements leading to development of recommendations to enhance the geospatial capabilities within the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). Sponsors have identified specific Information Exchange Packages (IEPs) from Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Justice/Law Enforcement domain and Maritime domain as representative examples for investigation in this initiative. The focus of efforts will be to address requirements in the context of the following information exchange domain areas:
Justice/Law Enforcement. The Justice/Law Enforcement domain in NIEM is defined by the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM). The Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), created in March 2001, evolved from a reconciliation of data definitions into an XML-based framework that would enable the entire justice and public safety communities to effectively share information at all levels. In 2005, GJXDM 3.0.3 became the first domain in NIEM. The Justice domain continues to provide the criminal justice system with the data elements, objects, and properties it needs to share critical information between jurisdictions and levels of government.
Maritime Domain Awareness. The Maritime domain supports the effective understanding of anything associated with global maritime that could impact the United States' security, safety, economy, or environment. NIEM facilitates this understanding through effective, timely sharing of vital, secure information among many key partners by representing vessels, people, cargo, and maritime locations and activities.Geo4NIEM initiative Sponsors are:

Summary
Command and Control (C2) Core (https://c2core.gtri.org) was an emerging data exchange capability within Department of Defense over the past three years. DoD CIO is now moving toward adopting the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) (http://niem.gov). C2 Core, which is 93% aligned with NIEM technical standards, will be used as the foundation for developing a Military Operations (MilOps) Domain in NIEM. The purpose of this experiment is to ensure interoperability of the MilOps Domain with OGC standards and tools build on those standards. This experiment will demonstrate that the MilOps Domain model and NIEM v2.1 technical concepts work in combination with geospatial standards as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (e.g., GML, WFS, WCS, WMS, etc.).

Initiator Organizations
The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are:

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

MITRE

Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

Description
The primary focus of this IE is to demonstrate MilOps is compatible with geospatial standards (e.g., GML, KML, WFS, etc.), as follows:

The content from MilOps IEPs, including embedded GML content, may be extracted and transformed into an OGC-standard format (e.g. GML, KML), and then plotted on a map.

The content from MilOps IEPs may be made available through a WFS-conforming interface (possibly transformed to GML or KML format), and then plotted on a map.

The content from MilOps IEPs may be transformed to OGC-standard formats and/or made available through a WFS-conforming interface without loss of accuracy or precision.

The desired outcome of this IE is to:

Successfully demonstrate that MilOps is fully compatible and supports in all of the areas of interest listed above, or

If areas are identified in the IE where MilOps is not compatible and does not support the areas of interest above, then attempt to develop a technical solution in MilOps to resolve the incompatibility and rerun that portion of the experiment to successfully demonstrate MilOps compatibility and support for the areas previously shown not to be supported, or

If incompatibilities previously identified are not resolved in MilOps, submit change request to OGC and recommend including them in a future test bed.

Background
This experiment is designed to demonstrate that MilOps works in combination with geospatial standards. The results of the experiment will be documented in an engineering report, and may result in change requests to MilOps or OGC standards as appropriate. Participants in the IE are expected to contribute to the engineering report. In addition, the artifacts from this experiment will be used as a basis for future tutorials demonstrating how to properly implement MilOps using embedded external standards such as GML. These tutorials will be made available to the community on the MilOps Developer Support Network.

What is it? An inter-disciplinary, inter-agency and international virtual observatory system for water resources information from observations and forecasts in the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities, designed to support these functions:

This interoperability experiment will advance the development of WaterML 2.0 and test its use in a forecasting context with various OGC service standards (SOS, SES, WFS, WMS and WCS). It will also contribute to a co-operation with the Met-Ocean domain working group. Where relevant to the forecasting context, it will contribute to the development and evaluation of a hydrology domain feature model and vocabularies, which are essential for interoperability in the hydrology domain, although these are not the main focus for the IE.
The use of O&M compliant WaterML 2.0 and OGC web services for data exchange is foreseen to improve real time operations between mutually dependent organizations by allowing easier access of frequently changing time series data. The ultimate use of the exposed data will depend on the context of participating organizations and their driving requirements. We expect the IE will result in further development of WaterML 2.0 and profiling of SOS to accommodate various time dimensions of a forecast as well as the ensemble capabilities. This may include a schema, example instances, and documentation describing the schema, a usage profile and best practice documents. It will also result in a documented evaluation of the compatibility of WaterML 2.0 with OGC services, which can feed back to OGC. In particular, the IE will implement and test WaterML 2.0 and OGC services within a real time forecasting context, addressing the time and ensemble dimensions of a forecast as well as the ability of the services to facilitate incremental data updates and notifications to trigger data exchange. capabilities.
This hydrologic forecasting IE will build on the work conducted in the Surface Water IE by adding the real time forecast context. We expect that the project will discover issues related to the forecast and ensemble dimension of the information model and the usage of event services for incremental data updates. New and upgraded web services amongst participants are also expected, increasing the overall availability of water data and the interoperability of water information systems. Development of client applications is a secondary concern; the focus of work is testing information models and service delivery mechanisms.
There have been some discussions toward the establishment of a joint experiment with the Met-Ocean DWG to include the incorporation of weather forecasts and ensembles. However this has not let to a mature plan at this time. We intend to continue this discourse and revisit a joint experiment in the future, perhaps as a follow-up activity to this Forecasting IE.

INITIATOR ORGANIZATIONS

The WMO is supporting the Interoperability Experiment within the scope of the existing MoU between OGC and WMO.
The OGC members that are acting as initiators of the Interoperability Experiment are:

Other organizations and their contributions, as they come on-stream, will be posted here.

DESCRIPTION

Objectives
The aim of this IE is:
(1) Extend and complement the work already underway in the Groundwater and Surfacewater IEs, with the goal of advancing the development of WaterML 2.0 to the sub domain of hydrologic forecasting
(2) Test compatibility of WaterML 2.0 with modified and new services by NOAA/NWS, and USGS by implementation of the OGC SOS, SES, WFS, WMS standards;
(3) Test compatibility of WaterML 2.0 for use with hydrological forecasting systems.
(4) Establish a limited surface water feature model and vocabularies suitable for the provision of surface water forecast data using WaterML 2.0.
(5) The data will be served by all participants using WaterML 2.0 and OGC services (SOS, SES, WFS, WMS).
(6) Optional: Test compatibility of O&M based weather forecast information model for use with hydrological forecasting systems.

4
February 2013. On 2 February 2012, the OGC began the OGC Web Services, Phase 9
(OWS-9) Testbed process with aRequest for
Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to
requirements. 10 sponsors provided requirements, a testbed plan was developed,
and 39 technology provider participants worked together for 8 months developing
and testing interoperability solutions to meet those requirements. On 15
January 2013, at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Redlands, California,
the participants demonstrated their work at a well-attended OWS-9 Demo event.

The 3D Portrayal Interoperability Experiment (IE) will demonstrate how 3D models stored in open or proprietary formats can be exploited by demonstrating different delivery mechanisms based on open standards-based formats and services. Relevant data include digital landscape models, city models, interior models, as well as analytical data representing the spatiotemporal distribution of non tangible things or simulation results. The IE will be intended to identify and further develop technologies and workflows that may be the foundation of a spatial data infrastructure that targets on rapid visualization of extremely large and complex 3D data. For selected showcase scenarios the interoperability of relevant formats and services will be tested. Particular emphasis will be on use of different client configurations. As an outcome, the IE will clarify the specifics of 3D portrayal services and provide best practices and guidelines for their implementation, integration, and usage. Additionally, the activities and findings of the IE participants are intended to directly support and influence current standardization efforts in service-based 3D portrayal.

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc (CUAHSI) has conducted research regarding water information services. CUAHSI now seeks to advance this research towards consensus adoption by sponsoring an initiative in the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Interoperability Program. Working with CUAHSI and other members of the hydrologic community, OGC will conduct a Concept Development study on the application of OGC Web Services to the domain of Water Information based upon the CUAHSI research results. OGC will produce an Engineering Report as the basis of planning for an OGC Best Practice and for an OGC Interoperability Program Pilot initiative.